Eat This Newsletter

Eat This Newsletter 149: Technology to the rescue

April 5, 2021

Hello Sometimes I get the feeling I’m just spinning my wheels here, as the same topics go round and round. Then I console myself with the thought that that’s...

Eat This Podcast: What is the value of functional foods?

March 29, 2021

Hello “[B]etween 2011 and 2015 there was a phenomenal 202% increase globally in the number of new food and drink products launched containing the terms...

Eat This Newsletter 148: Impeccable pedigrees

March 22, 2021

Hello As we in the northern hemisphere round the corner into spring, let’s start this round-up in Australia. At the circus, riding two horses at once There...

Eat This Podcast: Naomi Duguid: Exploring the World through Food

March 15, 2021

Hello Naomi Duguid travels the world — mostly in Asia — and brings back sensitive insights into the people and their food. She’s a photographer, writer,...

Eat This Newsletter 147: This'll warm the cockles

March 8, 2021

Hello The internet has been bountiful once again, so here are the things I have found most interesting these past couple of weeks. Archival cockle collectors...

Eat This Podcast: The cost is too damn high

March 1, 2021

Hello Three billion people couldn’t afford a healthy diet even if they wanted to. How do we know? The World Bank collects a massive amount of data in its...

Eat This Newsletter 146: Unbalanced diet

February 22, 2021

Hello I know we should all be eating just a little animal-sourced food for a balanced and sustainable diet, but sometime, overindulgence beckons. This is one...

Eat This Podcast: Still ticking

February 15, 2021

Hello As a young biology student, one of the things I and my classmates worried about was population. Firebrands like Paul Ehrlich whipped us up, and Limits...

Eat This Newsletter 145: Mixed bag

February 8, 2021

Hello No pictures, no preliminaries; let’s just have at it. A long noodle story Miranda Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan has...

Eat This Podcast: The importance of yesterday’s heritage breeds for tomorrow's food supply

February 1, 2021

Hello Modern livestock breeds are incredibly efficient, gaining weight at a prodigious rate and supplying astonishing quantities of milk and eggs. That...

Eat This Newsletter 144: What goes around

January 26, 2021

Hello A day late and a dollar short — except that it isn’t short. I won’t whine about why this edition is late, it’s all my own fault. But I will point out...

Eat This Podcast: The International Year of Fruits and Vegetables

January 18, 2021

Hello This is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, as designated by the United Nations and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization...

Eat This Newsletter 143: Does contain nuts

January 11, 2021

Hello I’m still enjoying the winter break, and hard at work on the next series of podcasts, so here’s another newsletter, for now. The peanut papers Just in...

Eat This Newsletter 142: Happy New Year

January 4, 2021

Hello Of course marking a new year on one specific day is a cultural artefact, and many cultures are doing their best to maintain their own markers. Throwing...

Eat This Newsletter 141: Too good to waste

December 21, 2020

Hello I’ve noticed in the past how, when I am thinking about some topic, I am much more likely to notice things related to that topic, and so it was with...

Eat This Podcast: Oh, poop

December 14, 2020

Hello It’s time to face an uncomfortable fact. After more than 200 episodes devoted in their various ways to what we eat and drink, I’ve never looked at the...

Eat This Newsletter 140: Concentration not needed

December 7, 2020

Hello Once again, I’ve been sipping from the firehose of the internet so you don’t have to. Here’s what I found. Concentrate! More and more of the global...

Eat This Podcast: How the Brits became a nation of tea drinkers

November 30, 2020

Hello When the British East India Company decided to try their hand growing tea in Assam, they came up against one big problem: back home, nobody much liked...

Eat This Newsletter 139: Home work

November 23, 2020

Hello Excuses? I got ‘em. One aspect of working from home can truly bite you when you least expect it, and that is internet access. All week, ours had been...

Eat This Podcast: Where did the chicken cross the road?

November 16, 2020

Hello Not so long ago, the only clues we had to animal domestication came from archaeological digs, and the origin stories they told were vague and...

Eat This Newsletter 138: Deceptive

November 9, 2020

Hello Things aren’t always what they seem. Temporary offers, healthy appearances, artisanal breads, culinary history and edible class signifiers all come...

Eat This Podcast: A Blissful Feast

November 2, 2020

Hello Teresa Lust teaches Italian at the Rassias Center for World Languages of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and is an acclaimed translator. A Blissful...

Eat This Newsletter 137: Renewal

October 26, 2020

Hello Hoard food, harvest olives and handle a 3000 hectare farm, plus price-fixing and molecular gastronomy. You’re welcome. Food hoarding on a global scale...

Eat This Podcast: We know what whole grain means. Whole grain food? Not so much.

October 19, 2020

Hello This week, the European Parliament will vote whether to ban food labels like “veggie burger“ and “veggie sausage”. Producers of plant-based foods say...

Eat This Newsletter 136: Copious

October 12, 2020

Hello A bumper haul this time around, with a lot of long, informative reads. To be absolutely honest, I don’t have much to say to put any of them in context,...

Eat This Podcast: Coffee leaf rust is bad news

October 5, 2020

Hello That picture is of what one scientist called the vampire of the vegetable world: coffee leaf rust. For me, Ceylon — Sri Lanka — is synonymous with tea....

Eat This Newsletter 135: Viva!

September 28, 2020

Hello Quite a bit of sciencey stuff this time around, and opportunities to point you to previous episodes of the podcast. Let’s get to it. Coffee and terror...

Eat This Podcast: Carême at home in New Zealand

September 21, 2020

Hello I was pleasantly surprised to get an email recently from an intriguing address: careme.co.nz. Naturally, I had to investigate further, and what I found...

Eat This Newsletter 134: Dated

September 14, 2020

Hello Newsletter items this week are a bit like fondly-remembered London busses; you wait for ages and three arrive at once. Coffee and wet markets get a...

Eat This Podcast: How the chilli conquered China

September 7, 2020

Hello And we’re back, with a scorcher. Szechuan food is hot and spicy, chilli-laden, at least for me. Chilli pepper is firmly established as the most widely...

Eat This Newsletter 133: Entirely whole

August 31, 2020

Hello I’ve enjoyed doing the newsletter every week, and I’m also enjoying arranging and editing forthcoming episodes of the podcast, which will resume next...

Eat This Newsletter 132: Underserved

August 24, 2020

Hello The main conclusion I draw from this week’s selection of goodies that that when you really think about things, they are seldom as simple as others...

Eat This Newsletter 131: Underserved

August 17, 2020

Hello No sooner have I got it into my head that a weekly newsletter is a good thing, especially while I am not actively making podcasts, than the well runs a...

Eat This Newsletter 130: Ghosts

August 10, 2020

Hello Lots of stories today strung together somewhat loosely by the nature of place. The places people are from, the places crop plants are from, the places...

ETN 129: Capital

August 3, 2020

Hello My plan was to lead this issue with the news that foie gras can now be had legally in California, with a link to the episode about foie gras with...

ETN 128: Global concerns

July 27, 2020

Hello I hope you enjoyed the previous edition of Eat This Newsletter. Because I was away, I have a bit of a backlog of stuff I’ve collected, and because I am...

Eat This Newsletter 127: Ingenious solutions

July 20, 2020

Hello Yes, I’ve been away. No, I’m not going to anguish here about all the dead olive trees still littering the landscape of Salento. And though I will...

Eat This Podcast: Coffee, but not as we know it

June 29, 2020

Hello I thought I was pretty savvy about coffee taxonomy knowing that there were two kinds, arabica and robusta. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a research paper...

Eat This Newsletter 126: Hop off

June 22, 2020

Hello Frog legs have never really appealled to me. I can see that they might provide useful protein as well as pest-control services to a rice farmer, but as...

Eat This Podcast: Alexis Soyer: The very model of a modern chef

June 15, 2020

Hello Long before the current crop of celebrity chefs, Alexis Soyer showed how it should be done. He cooked unimaginably luxurious — and expensive — dinners...

Eat This Newsletter 125: Bad apples

June 8, 2020

Hello It has been a difficult couple of weeks, even sitting on the sidelines, trying to listen rather than to speak. However, speak I must, if only to...

Eat This Podcast: Questions of Taste

June 1, 2020

Hello This is the third in a little mini-series on taste. Can we disentangle aspects of gustatory taste that are common to all human beings from those that...

Eat This Newsletter 124: Indigenous

May 18, 2020

Hello Bit of a mixed bag this time, so let’s start with possibly the most useful news of the past two weeks: New test could guarantee the perfect avocado. No...

Eat This Podcast: You are what you drink

May 11, 2020

Or maybe you drink what you are. Hello This is the second episode in my little mini-series on taste. Chad Ludington, author of The Politics of Wine in...

Eat This Newsletter 123: Meat matters

May 4, 2020

Hello Last time I tried hard to find stories that were not about Covid-19. What has emerged clearly, though, is that the disease has suddenly opened people’s...

Eat This Podcast: What is good taste? What tastes good?

April 27, 2020

Hello Can we say anything sensible about taste? Part of me knows that taste is entirely subjective. But another part of me is quite willing to think about...

Eat This Newsletter 122: a series of smooth segues

April 20, 2020

Hello It is all but impossible to avoid Covid stories about food, or anything else. I’ve tried, honest. Other diseases are still around Not to make light of...

Eat This Podcast: The Man Who Tried to Feed the World

April 13, 2020

Hello The Man Who Tried to Feed the World is the title of a new TV documentary about Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder credited with launching the Green...

Eat This Newsletter 121: Ooops. I forgot one of the links.

April 6, 2020

Hello I hope everyone is bearing up. We certainly are, and if my homemade pizza isn’t as good as the stuff we’re accustomed to, well … too bad. At least it...

Eat This Podcast: The true heart of Russian Food

March 30, 2020

Hello Darra Goldstein combines a scholar’s knowledge of history and literature with a cook’s interest in recipes and ingredients. Her latest book took her on...